Anybody who’d got
a boat what they thought a lot of, would take it much further inland,
obviously, so it wasn’t destroyed or damaged. All the Wivenhoe
One-Designs were housed somewhere, weren’t they? Because there was quite
a few of them here.

1936 was when they
started, local people had them, business people, like the two doctors had
one each – Radcliffe, Dr Dean - Mr Slaughter, and Mr Cracknell. Mr
Worsp.
They all had these boats, it’s only a 15-foot boat. 15-foot dinghy,
three-quarter deck, which are still about, by the way. They’re still
sailing now. This was when Dr Radcliffe came here, and his yacht designing
was a hobby with him. He’d actually been at university with Peter Scott,
the naturalist, and that’s where he got his interest from. There was
nothing new, in such, it was a smaller version of the Brightlingsea
One-Design of the 1920s, wasn’t it? So it was probably more suitable for
up river. They were 15 feet as against 18 feet, so they were ideal for the
river, and the estuary, and that was it. They came about because, prior to
that, the Sailing Club had a mixed bag of boats, so it was a question of
handicaps, which always caused arguments on decisions, and being what you
were handicapped. Radcliffe come up with this design, so they were
One-Design, hence the name. The idea was quite common in Sailing Clubs all
over the country, they have their One-Design, so they’re all racing
equally.

Dr Radcliffe and the
Wivenhoe One-Design - Ray Hall

Then, of course, we
still had people like Dr Radcliffe on the Committee, and Mr Worsp, and
people who in those days, was business people in Wivenhoe. There was
George Slaughter, who had the paper shop. Billy Cracknell, who was the
baker. Dr Dean. Dr Radcliffe, of course.

Dr Radcliffe
obviously designed the Wivenhoe One boat, and I believe the first six
boats were built at Leigh-on-Sea, for about £25 each. But there’s
several been built elsewhere since then. They suspended operations during
the Second World War, so he’s Commodore at ’39 through till 1947. And
the next gentleman, Mr Pawsey, it was his family who supplied the old
shed, the hut on the hard, which was a chicken house in Layer, and they
built the piers, and put old rail lines on it to bridge the beams, which
are still there!

I think the point
really was that there was a lot of handicap racing. Probably, in those
days, there were a lot of Clubs who were looking for an alternative to
handicap racing, and obviously any particular One-Design was going to
alleviate that problem of handicapping – that’s if the boats could all
be built to the same design. So there was quite an interest, several
people had them built. But I suppose, today, with the modern materials,
obviously they’re something that will never be built again.

Reviving the Wivenhoe
One-Design - Alan Tyne (with Jan Tyne)

The ‘WOD Fleet’
– Wivenhoe One-Design Fleet – underwent a tremendous revival under the
influence of Walter Evans, who joined the Club, having returned from the
Colonies as an administrator, some time in the late Seventies/early
Eighties, I think, and he decided to make it his work to get the whole WOD
Fleet back on the water again, and he virtually succeeded in doing that.
He got them all restored, and got them all owned, and wouldn’t let
people neglect them, and basically bullied and chivvied everyone to get it
going, and it was that injection of organising skill and ability to bring
people along with you that really gave a terrific fillip to the WOD Fleet.
The WOD Fleet had been dispersed to different parts of the country. And
they fetched a load of them back, and fetched others out of retirement,
and renovated them. But subsequently, it’s gone right back downhill
again. There’s only two or three sailing at any one time, at the moment,
although there are probably about six or eight that are actually in
commission, but there’s another six or eight that are languishing behind
people’s sheds, slowly rotting away. We lack another kind of injection
of organising capacity like Walter Evans’s. But there’s a Wivenhoe
One-Design Owners Association, which meets regularly every year, and has a
great Jazz Evening, every year! And they’re a very vibrant little
Organisation, it’s a sort of a sub-Club, if you like!

You’ve only got a WOD on
loan - Brian Sinclair

[When I came to
Wivenhoe in 1980] I did a few odd jobs for Walter Evans, because I was
quite handy with the tools, and he said, ‘You can’t possibly live in
Wivenhoe, with those two delightful girls, and not go sailing,’ and, of
course, at this point, I’d thought, ‘I’d love to go sailing, but
(a), I’ve only ever handled motorboats,’ admittedly in all sorts of
weather conditions, and landed on surfy beaches and things like that, but
it’s a different ballgame here. He said, ‘I’ve got just the boat for
you,’ and it turned out to be a Wivenhoe One-Design – Number 2.

So we paid for
Number 2, Duet, I think at the rate of £20 a month until we’d paid for
her – I think she only cost about £110 because I found out, afterwards,
she’d been dropped from the first floor of the Jam Factory, and
repaired, and everybody was a bit suspicious of buying her! Anyway, there
we were and so Walter took me out for a half-hour sailing lesson, at which
point I thought, ‘How do you stop these things?’ It’s all very well
if you want to stop a rowing boat or a motorboat, there are ways of
stopping it, but there didn’t seem to be any way of stopping a sailing
boat! But we had a half-hour lesson. ‘There you are,’ he said,
‘nothing to it.’

The next time I
went out, I found that there was a lot to it, as I crashed in amongst all
the boats on the moorings, trying to stop this darned thing! And I
remember coming ashore on the old hard at the Sailing Club, and feeling
very embarrassed at my efforts, and a fairly high ranking officer in the
Club said to me, rather coldly, ‘Hardly the place to practice sailing,
in amongst the moorings, is it.’ So bit of egg on the face there!

I sold my Wivenhoe
One-Design because we were collecting boats, rather stupidly, and I’d
got the Wivenhoe One-Design, I rebuilt the Wivenhoe One-Design in the
early 1990s, at the same time as all this other business was going on with
moving the Club, and that was a two-year project to rebuild her
completely, and then we started winning races, and I discovered that I
didn’t enjoy winning any more than I did losing, in a weird sort of way!
So I thought, ‘Well, I’ll sell the boat while she’s in fine
fettle,’ and what you do, you don’t sell to the highest bidder, you
sell to somebody you know can look after her. You know, money’s not the
important thing with those. You’ve really only got a Wivenhoe One-Design
on loan, you know, it has to stay here.

We have a small
cruiser which we keep in Alresford Creek, which hasn’t been on the water
for 18 months, and my wife, Jan, has a Mirror Dinghy which she races
sometimes. She won the Ladies Cup this year, and we’ve just acquired a
little day sailing boat to take the children, grandchildren, sailing. All
these boats are old wrecks, you know, they’re all cheap things!

[Boats have] almost
got a service record, the Wivenhoe One-Designs, you can trace the owners
from the time they were built. And some of them have fallen into really
bad repair. One young chap, relatively new to Wivenhoe, who I introduced
to the Club, he bought one that was really totally unseaworthy and falling
to bits through neglect. He bought her and had her rebuilt professionally,
it cost him about £7,000 to have it rebuilt, and when you consider that
they sell for between £800 and £1,500, it’s not a good business
proposition, I can assure you! And a new suit of sails costs £600, so
it’s not a business proposition, but they’re nice little boats. So,
yes, we do sail still, and I occasionally crew on the sailing smacks at
Brightlingsea, and we had a couple of trips on a Thames barge last year.

Racing a WOD - Stan
Fenton

I’ve
got a Wivenhoe One-Design, which was built in the 1930s, and there’s
still about 10, 11, 12 sailing at Wivenhoe, and racing regularly.
They’re clinker-built, about 14 foot long, and they carry a spinnaker,
gib and mainsail, and they’re two-man boats, which is two to crew, and
they race quite competitively still today.

[To
win dinghy races] you have to have a very good boat. You have to have a
well tuned up boat with good sails, and you have to have a very good crew
and work together as a team, because the helmsman would steer the boat,
and use the mainsail, while the crewman would use the gib, and he’d fly
the spinnaker. And you have to also work in tandem together to sit the
boat out, get the weight right, know when to tack. So good teamwork
really, is very important.

A
lot of it is you have to know the wind, and look out for wind shifts,
especially in the river, like the River Colne, up at Wivenhoe, the
conditions can be quite fluky, so I have to judge where the wind shifts
are, tack into the wind. One side of the river there could be no wind, the
other side could be where the little breeze is. The local conditions, yes,
you build up over the years. And also, keeping out the tide is very
important. It’s a tidal river, so obviously the mainstream of the tide
is in the middle, and it’s obviously a lot more advantage to keep to the
edges of the river if you can, without going aground. It’s a balancing
act of how you do it, yes.

I’ve always sailed - Ken Green

I’ve always
sailed, of course. I started my sailing in Wivenhoe One-Designs, because
my father had Elise – Elise crops up again, of course! He had a Wivenhoe
One-Design built in the mid-Thirties, 1930s, number 17 it is, so I sailed
as soon as - well, as soon as I was able to get aboard there! I sailed
with him, and all my brothers have sailed and we’ve always been very
interested in sailing. Grandfather was a very keen sailor, and yes,
sailing has always been part and parcel of the fishing scene.

Sailing dinghies was competitive, oh
yes, yes. Crikey, yes! The Wivenhoe One-Design is very competitive. You
sail for the Sykes Trophy and we sailed against Peter Sainty, who was a
very good sailor. I think Peter had the edge on us from the point of view
of expertise, he was always very good at the job. But amongst Peter, Doug
and myself, quite often we were in separate boats and competing with each
other. Sometimes we were together, and sometimes we were in separate
boats.

Early days in the WODs - Ray
Hall

Then it was not unusual to see at
least twelve One-Designs out, and at the time when new classes were coming
in, and especially the GP, that took on a bit. That would have gone on
much longer if it hadn’t have been for the Mirror. Once the Mirror came
in, and the people found that they got a lighter-built boat, but a faster
boat, and a very safe boat.

But we never had rescue boats in
those days! It was quite often that one or two of the One-Design owners
would actually leave the boat downriver and walk ashore and walk home, and
then go back on the next tide and pick it up, because if there was no
wind, you just couldn’t battle against the tide, you see. We never had
anybody to tow us back! And, of course, there was all cloth cap and
plimsolls, and no waterproofs! I don’t ever remember lifejackets. I
think the first set of waterproofs I had was in 1959, these very heavy
yellow plastics.

When I was in the RAF Air/Sea Rescue
at Felixstowe, quite often, I used to come here at the weekend, and if
there was racing, I used to race with Tony in number 12, Sapphire, and we
could sort them out! I think Tony’s name was on most trophies for a few
years. A damned good sailor was Tony. Of course, we always had the
competition from people like Doug Green, and David Petter in Peewit, and
his brother, Michael. We weren’t without competition, that’s true, and
Peter and Arthur Sainty in Ranger, they did want some beating! There was
no doubt. But Tony and I, obviously, at that time, we were the right
weight. Never any arguments. He only ever said about three words to me,
as, ‘Ready?’ ‘About.’ ‘Lee oh,’ and the boat was there.